The Diabetes-Free Cookbook & Exercise Guide: 80 Utterly Delicious Recipes & 12 Easy Exercises to Keep Your Blood Sugar Low

By John Poothullil and Colleen Cackowski

This cookbook & exercise guide is unique and different than other cookbooks. It offers 80 recipes for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks that are mostly free of grains and grain-flours, which are the real cause of high blood sugar and Type 2 diabetes. In addition, 12 simple exercises are provided (with corollary animations on the internet) that can help patients with diabetes develop better conditioning and balance to prevent falls and improve flexibility. The recipes were developed by a professional chef following the thesis of the author, Dr. John Poothullil, whose insight is that Type 2 diabetes is caused by our modern diet full of grains, rather than by the unproven theory of insulin resistance. The book offers an introduction to explain this insight and why it is far more biologically logical than the theory of insulin resistance. Altering one's diet with these delicious, easy-to-make recipes can help lower blood sugar and even reverse Type 2 diabetes. The book includes photos of 40 of the fully cooked or prepared recipes. Recipe instructions are clearly spelled out and use ingredients that can be found in most grocery stores. No special cooking skills required to cook these recipes. Finally, these recipes are truly new and different; these are not like other diabetes cookbooks which contain a lot of "cook some meat and add a salad or vegetable" recipes. These are creative and imaginative recipes that will tantalize the taste buds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Insights Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798986016375

John Poothullil

John Poothullil, MD, FRCP, practiced medicine as a pediatrician and allergist for more than 30 years, 27 of which were in Texas. He received his medical degree from the University of Kerala, India in 1968. He holds certifications from the American Board of Pediatrics and The American Board of Allergy & Immunology. During his medical practice, Dr. Poothullil became interested in understanding the causes of hunger and weight gain. His interest turned into multi-decade research project that guided him to investigate the theory of insulin resistance as it relates to diabetes.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

There may be several reasons you find yourself interested in this book. Perhaps as someone with Type 2 diabetes who is taking a medication or injecting insulin you are also looking for new ways to control your blood sugar because you found it impossible to avoid foods you love.

Or perhaps you are one of the estimated 96 million people in the United States with prediabetes or a family history of diabetes.

Maybe you are simply looking for a lifestyle change that will benefit your overall wellness through diet and exercise.

Whatever your reasons for wanting to read this book, I can help you in two ways. First, as a retired medical doctor committed to reducing the dangerous health consequences of diabetes in America, I have teamed up with a professional chef who has created fantastic-tasting recipes that will help keep your blood sugar low. Second, I have compiled a variety of very simple and brief exercises that you can do to keep your body in condition.

Diet and exercise are the true keys to preventing or even reversing Type 2 diabetes — and I will explain why. I will also show how anyone can learn to change their eating habits, and why it is so important.

It is difficult for some to stop eating foods they love. They know they should make a change, and they may commit in their mind to eating less at each meal or to giving up foods they know are unhealthy for them. But pure willpower can diminish after a short time, and so most people fall back into their usual eating patterns, willing to live with their high blood sugar or diabetes without thinking about the consequences.

However, I am convinced that you can make a change in your eating habits, and this book can help. What sets this book apart from many others is that we have created a set of meals and desserts that are easy to make and adopt into your routines. They are also super tasty and attractive to your taste buds. Once you try these recipes, you will see that you can indeed eat great meals while at the same time keeping your blood sugar in check. The key is to eat foods that do not cause your blood sugar to spike so high that it takes hours to return to the normal blood sugar range. That is how you begin moving away from being prediabetic or fully diabetic. With meals like these, you can even begin to lower your blood sugar enough to reverse your diagnosed Type 2 diabetes.

How I Became Interested in Diabetes & What I Found Out

I am a retired medical doctor, having practiced for 35 years. I didn’t practice endocrinology — the medical specialty that deals with diabetes. But that allowed me to study diabetes from a different perspective and champion a different methodology for people to avoid or reverse it.

While I was in medical school, endocrinology professors told us to believe, as they did themselves, that Type 2 diabetes is a hormonal disease caused by insulin resistance. I had no reason to dispute this.

Towards the end of my training, I became aware of one of my relatives who was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. She was taking insulin to control her blood sugar. Her husband, a professor in a medical school, adjusted her insulin dosage to keep her blood sugar level within an acceptable range. Nevertheless, a few years later, she had to have one of her legs amputated due to reduced blood supply to her leg — a well-known complication of Type 2 diabetes in many adults. I thought her doctor would change her diabetes medication because taking insulin had not stopped her leg complication. To my surprise though, her doctor continued the same line of treatment using insulin. Within a few more months, she had to have the other leg amputated.

I started paying more attention to people who were on insulin to treat their Type 2 diabetes. To my shock, I found others who suffered severe consequences. One friend who was a trained scientist had to have three toes amputated, one after another, after keeping his blood sugar level within normal limits for years using insulin. I soon learned about similar experiences among many acquaintances who lost their vision and others who lost kidney function.

I wondered how this could be. Despite taking medications or injecting insulin, I saw that diabetic patients still suffered the consequences of long-term diabetes. About 25 years ago, I began intently studying the medical literature on hunger, weight gain, obesity, and diabetes.

Through my research, I came to a surprising conclusion — the theory of insulin resistance was illogical and remained scientifically unproven. I knew I was going against tradition. This theory, however, is what endocrinologists believe in and is the rationale they use to keep prescribing medications and insulin injections to diabetic patients.

So what might cause high blood sugar and diabetes?

I soon came to realize that the answer is staring us right in the face. It is our modern diet, heavily filled with complex carbohydrates that flood the bloodstream with glucose (sugar). Among so many cultures around the world, the modern diet is the only common denominator that can possibly explain the global increase in the incidence of high blood sugar and Type 2 diabetes. I do not believe that more and more humans are evolving to be insulin resistant. The body produces over 50 hormones, so why would it become resistant to just one? I also know that no genetic defect has ever been discovered that links to Type 2 diabetes.

I suggest that the rising incidence of diabetes began after the Green Revolution of the 1960s. New technologies and fertilizers increased the farming of cultivated grains, and governments around the world began subsidizing grain production to ensure enough food for their populations. New milling technologies and lower shipping costs made grain-flour products cheap and easily available. Americans especially, but also people in most Western nations, began consuming a variety of breads, rolls, cakes and pies, doughnuts, pasta, rice, corn, pizza, tortillas...and the list goes on.

Why Do Grains and Grain-flour Products Cause Diabetes?

Let me explain why I suggest that our modern diet high in grains and grain-flour products is the most likely trigger for the development of prediabetes or Type 2 diabetes. It is because the typical diet that includes more than 50% of one’s daily caloric intake in the form of complex carbohydrates produces a voluminous amount of glucose that the body’s cells cannot use on an immediate basis. Some glucose is stored in the liver, then released between meals for the body’s energy needs until the next meal.

But here is the key — any unused glucose is transformed into fatty acids that are then stored in one’s fat cells. The problem is, each individual has only a certain capacity for fat storage, based on their body type and genetic inheritance. At some point, one’s fat cells can literally become full, leaving nowhere for the fatty acids produced from the unused glucose after each meal to be stored.

The result is that the fatty acids remain circulating in the bloodstream. What diabetes specialists seldom admit, however, is that our muscle cells — the largest energy producers in the body — are like a hybrid car. They can burn either glucose or fatty acids for producing energy. Fatty acids can enter right into muscle cells faster and more easily than glucose — and they do, leaving glucose in the bloodstream, thus high blood sugar.

This is what I call the fatty acid burn switch. A long-term diet high in complex carbohydrates is what eventually causes chronic high blood sugar — and that eventually becomes Type 2 diabetes.

A diet high in grains and grain-flour products that produce excessive amounts of fatty acids that fill your fat cells is also what leads to weight gain and, for an increasing number of people, obesity. This explains why the majority of people with Type 2 diabetes are overweight or obese as they enter their 40s, 50s, and 60s. But this same diet also explains why we are seeing children as young as 12 and teens become overweight, obese, and even diabetic.

Nevertheless, diabetes can also occur in thin people, simply because they have a small number of fat cells, which leaves them no room to store excess fatty acids. They too can undergo the fatty acid burn switch, creating high blood sugar and diabetes. In many developing countries, such as India, an increasing number of people with Type 2 diabetes are not considered to be extremely overweight. In addition, in Western countries 15% of people with Type 2 diabetes are not considered overweight.

The same biological mechanism of the fatty acid burn switch also explains why a pregnant woman with no previous history of diabetes can develop gestational diabetes. Simply put, when a pregnant woman fills up her fat storage capacity, her muscles switch to burning fatty acids, leaving glucose in the bloodstream. This explanation is in contrast to the present situation, in which endocrinologists have absolutely no hypothesis to explain the development of insulin resistance in lean or pregnant diabetics.

Support for Why Diet — Not Medication — Is the Key to Moderating Diabetes

Here is something odd that supports what I am telling you about the real cause of high blood sugar and diabetes. You will usually hear that today’s medical advice recommends that people with diabetes eat a low carbohydrate diet.

This advice comes from mainstream endocrinologists who support the insulin resistance theory. Although on one hand they recognize that a low-carb diet plays some role in controlling high blood sugar, though they don’t know why, on the other hand they tell their patients to continue taking diabetes medications or injecting insulin.

In my view, these doctors are still largely counting on medications as the answer to controlling blood sugar; and they are doing so only because the insulin resistance theory is what they learned in medical school. They are unable to admit this theory is wrong, yet they accept a clear connection between a low carbohydrate diet and low blood sugar.

I am not suggesting that you cannot achieve a low blood sugar level using medications. You can, at least for a while. But what I am saying is that the medication/insulin injection approach has two serious flaws.

First, it is difficult to maintain a desired blood glucose level using medications such as insulin. Your blood sugar level is actually a moving target. Throughout the day, and especially after each meal, it changes depending on what you ate. It swings upwards for about two hours after you eat a meal, then slowly descends. This forces someone with high blood sugar to keep measuring the level of their blood glucose. This is why diabetics who inject insulin must decide how much insulin to inject before and after each meal, or even throughout the day.

The second flaw is what I told you about above. There is absolutely no doubt any longer that, despite taking diabetes medications or injecting insulin, a large percentage of diabetics still end up with one or more of the serious consequences of diabetes: loss of kidney function (which leads to permanent dialysis), loss of vision, and/or nerve damage to limbs (which results in amputation of toes or legs). Yet endocrinologists still prefer to treat diabetes using medications or insulin injections instead of dietary changes. This is tragic.

For these reasons, I suggest to you that it is far better to control your blood sugar level by regulating what you eat. Let me put it this way: if you don’t put glucose (carbohydrates) into your mouth, you won’t need to worry about having high blood sugar. Doesn’t this make logical sense to you? The fact is that cultivated grains or foods made with them are not necessary for healthy living.

You may not completely understand the science behind what I have just explained. But that is okay. If you want to learn more about that science, click on the QR code to see an animation video titled Challenging Your Assumptions about Type 2 Diabetes that illustrates the concept of the fatty acid burn switch. You can also read more about authentic weight, weight gain, and obesity in the Appendix section of this book where I answer a number of FAQs.

Proof that Dietary Changes Can Help

As I was writing this book, an observational study was published in the British Medical Journal Nutrition that showed that 77% of a doctor’s patients who followed a lower-carbohydrate diet without medications experienced remission of Type 2 diabetes within one year. However, over the next fifteen years some reverted back to their old ways of eating and the overall remission rate dropped to 51%. These results are impressive and meaningful.

The remission of Type 2 diabetes with a drug-free dietary change cited in this study supports my suggestion that overnutrition (eating too much carbohydrate), rather than insulin resistance, is responsible for the elevation of blood sugar leading to the development of Type 2 diabetes. The key to lowering blood sugar level without the use of medications is to reduce the intake of food products which upon digestion release glucose into the blood stream. In our modern day meals, the main culprit is complex carbohydrates primarily coming from grains and grain-flour products.

Try These Recipes for Just One Month

For now, what counts most is recognizing that your diet is the single most important factor you can control to lower your blood sugar — and even potentially to prevent or reverse Type 2 diabetes. If you are willing to try altering your diet for just a few weeks, you will see your blood sugar level go down, you may lose a few pounds, and you will feel healthier and more active.

I have already written two books about diabetes in which I explain why I believe the insulin resistance theory is incorrect and why the modern diet high in complex carbohydrates is most certainly the cause of high blood sugar and diabetes. In those books, I provided general information about how to eat for nutrition — cutting out carbs and emphasizing fresh, seasonal vegetables, fruits, and nuts, plus, if desired, a variety of meats, fish, and dairy products. But my readers kept asking me to tell them more precisely what they should eat and how they should cook.

I therefore concluded that it was time to do a cookbook with great recipes to keep your blood sugar level down. Here you will find breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, and dessert recipes with minimal use of grains or grain flours. My objective is not to avoid grains completely but to substantially lower the amount of complex carbohydrate consumed in your diet. These recipes were created by a wonderfully creative nutritionist and chef, Colleen Cackowski, who put her heart and soul into crafting mouth-watering, flavorful meals that are easy and fun to make. You will be amazed at how various ingredients like black beans or riced cauliflower can be mixed with other ingredients to create the flavors and mouth-textures you enjoy.

For the most part, these recipes do not require many special ingredients; most of what you will need you can find at a typical chain grocery store, such as Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, Trader Joe’s, Food Lion, Giant, Publix, Meijer, Whole Foods, or from Amazon.

The greatest advantage of these recipes is that you will not lose your enjoyment of eating or be told to follow a lot of restrictions. For example, these recipes do not show how many calories are in them. My belief is that most people have enough fat stored up in the body to have the